Te Rākau Theatre’s epic play Dog & Bone, with a cast of 26, takes to the stage at Te Papa’s Soundings Theatre in January.
The play is set in Wellington in 1869, "a bitter time when savage lives were cheap, hungry colonial greed ruled, and hopeful settlers were disembarking to find themselves in a war zone."
The Māori Theatre Trust, Te Rākau, is Wellington based. They work in schools, prisons, Marae, rural communities, and youth justice residencies around Aotearoa using a tikanga Māori framework.
The Dog & Bone team of 40 includes experienced professionals and award winning actors, graduates and students of New Zealand's major performing arts schools, secondary and primary students, interns, amateur theatre lovers and children.
Dog & Bone is the second in writer Helen Pearse-Otene's series Undertow- a series of plays about the settlement of Wellington which, while tackling major historical events, also reminds us of the ordinary people who lived, loved, fought, sacrificed, lost, won, and ultimately called this place home in 1869.
Pearse-Otene’s extensive research for the play included settlers’ and Armed Constabulary diaries, newspaper articles, and ngā kupu tuku iho (oral histories) of local Iwi.
Dog & Bone points to a pivotal moment in our country’s race relations history - when media was first used to paint Māori as inferior and dangerous and therefore unworthy of their lands. It tells a story of the real people who were making, living with, disseminating, fighting, accepting and benefitting from these ideas.
The play kicks off on January 21 until January 31.